I'm prone to envy. Not always, but enough to be annoying.
It's an oddly difficult admission. We'll happily tell people we're anxious, depressed or angry. We'll confess to procrastinating, drinking too much and spending three hours on our phones when we were supposedly working. But envy? Nobody wants to admit it. It makes us sound small, petty and mean-spirited. The sort of person who hears about a friend's spectacular success and says, "That's fantastic," while grinding their teeth.
I have a friend who quit psychiatry about a decade ago to become a full-time writer. I envied him immediately. Turning ideas into stories has always been an ambition of mine, and here he was actually doing it. Then he started winning awards for his plays, which didn't help. Gore Vidal reportedly said, "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." I know the feeling.
But envy is normal — we're social animals, and we don't just want to know how we're doing; we want to know how we're doing compared with everyone else, particularly people similar to us. I don't spend much time envying Elon Musk. His life is so different from mine that the comparison is almost meaningless. But show me another psychiatrist and writer of roughly my vintage who has just published a bestseller, and suddenly I'm paying attention.
Psychologists call this upward social comparison. We see someone doing better than us and feel the sting. Then something interesting happens: envy can go in two directions.
The two flavours of envy
Psychologists distinguish between benign and malicious envy. Both start in the same place: they have something I want. Benign envy says, I wish I had that too. Malicious envy says, I wish they didn't.
Benign envy can motivate us. We see someone fitter, richer or more accomplished and think: Bloody hell, I need to lift my game. Malicious envy directs the energy at them instead. We criticise. We gossip. We decide they were lucky, overrated, undeserving. And if things later go badly for them, we get schadenfreude thrown in as a bonus.
This distinction reveals something. When somebody has what you want, there are two ways to close the gap. You can raise yourself, or you can bring them down.
That's the fork in the road.
The view from my office
In thirty years of psychiatry, I could count on one hand the patients who have walked in and said, "I'm envious." Envy almost never announces itself. It arrives disguised — as a grievance about a sibling's inheritance, a sudden concern about a successful friend's "values", or a forensic interest in whether a colleague really earned that promotion.
And I've watched the fork play out over years, in both directions. Many people turn envy into something useful – a fuel for change. Others let envy eat them up – resentment can consume attention, disrupt sleep, worsen mood and feed existing distress.
So, can we get better at choosing the first road? The research suggests we probably can. Here are seven places to start.
- Admit you're envious
This sounds ridiculously simple. It isn't. Envy has an extraordinary ability to disguise itself as objective analysis. She's not that talented. He was lucky. It's all about who you know. Perhaps. But before assembling the prosecution case, try saying: I'm envious. Not through a megaphone. Just to yourself. Until then, you're merely an impartial observer who has inexplicably spent 45 minutes cataloguing someone else's deficiencies.
- Check whether it really is unfair
Sometimes things genuinely are unfair. Someone gets the job because they know the boss. Someone takes credit for your work. That may not be just envy. It may also be injustice, and injustice deserves a response — a complaint, a conversation, or an exit.
The complication is that envy is very good at deciding retrospectively that someone's success was undeserved, because perceived unfairness is one of the things that tips envy into malice. So run the test: was this genuinely unfair, or would I simply prefer to believe it was?
One related caveat. Not every gap should be closed by trying harder. Sometimes envy is rightly telling you the game is rigged, unwinnable, or not worth winning. The answer then isn't more effort. It's playing a different game.
- Change the "if only"
My favourite bit of the envy literature. After an upward comparison, malicious envy points the "if only" at the other person: if only they hadn't got that break. Benign envy points it back at us: if only I'd started earlier. Better still, deliberately redirecting these thoughts seems to shift the envy itself. So when you catch yourself thinking if only they…, try if only I… One word. Quite a difference.
- Find the bit you can do something about
If another person's advantage feels completely out of reach, envy tends to turn malicious. If there's something you can do about your own position, it becomes fuel. Someone runs a marathon in three hours. You can think: genetic freak, probably has no knees left anyway, or maybe I could train more. The first protects your ego. The second gives you a plan.
Which is why, when I watch AFL footballer Nick Daicos, I don't conclude that this is the year I finally force my way into the Collingwood midfield. I conclude that I could probably lose five kilos and start running again. You don't have to close the whole gap. Find the part you control.
- Ask whether you actually want it
People seem more likely to feel benign envy about things they genuinely value. That raises a surprisingly good question: do you actually want what you're envying? The bigger house? The 200,000 Instagram followers? Their job? We spend an astonishing amount of our lives competing in contests we never consciously entered. Sometimes the answer is yes — good, your envy has just told you something. Sometimes you realise you're furious about losing a game you don't particularly want to play. Stop playing.
- Study the method, not the winner — then ask them
Malicious envy stares at the person. Benign envy studies how they did it. How does she train? How did they build the business? What can you steal? Not literally. We're trying to improve your character here.
Better still, ask them. Workplace research has found that people who sought advice from the very colleagues they envied went on to perform better. And once you're actually talking to them, something else happens. They become a person again. Not a ranking. Not a threat.
- Find out about their failures
Success hides its denominator. We see the bestselling novel, not the drawer of rejected manuscripts. In my world, we see the professor's title, not the decade of failed grant applications behind it. We see the holiday photograph from Hamilton Island, not the argument in the taxi from the airport.
Learning about the failures of successful people can reduce malicious envy, and one field study of entrepreneurs found evidence that it may increase the benign kind. When success looks effortless, the person seems impossibly superior. When you see the setbacks and persistence behind it, their success becomes a process. And processes can be copied.
Don't waste your envy
There will always be someone richer than you. Younger. Better-looking. More successful. Someone with a happier marriage, a bigger audience, nicer abs, or children who appear to have voluntarily done their homework. You're not going to win the comparison game.
My writer friend taught me that. I can't pinpoint the exact moment my envy shifted from sulking to taking notes. Eventually, I made a plan and got my finances in order for early semi-retirement. I also completed a few writing courses. It took me about five years to make my own version of his leap.
I learnt from him, and his decision became my blueprint. By the time I made my move, he was onto the next thing, getting his first novel published, so once again I'm envious and playing catch-up.
That's fine. He keeps making the path easier to see.
So the next time someone's good fortune gives you that familiar little wince, pay attention. Your envy may be trying to tell you something. Then ask yourself one question: do I want less for them or more for me?